Developing a smart charger for EVs' charging impact mitigation

This paper proposes a smart charger to mitigate the charging impact of Electric Vehicles (EVs) on power grids. The proposed smart charger uses the parameters measured from the power grid, the EV charger and the EV battery pack to adjust the charging current of the proposed charger. Fuzzy control is used in this paper to integrate these measured parameters into designing a smart charger prototype with rated power 200W. Experimental results verify that the proposed charger can automatically adjust the charging current corresponding to the variations of power grid and EV. Test case analyzes the impact of 100 EVs with rated power 7kW charging simultaneously in a community. Test result shows that the charging impact of EV can be effectively mitigated by the proposed smart chargers. Since the proposed smart charger can be realized without the centralized control systems and information exchanges between EV chargers, an entirely distributed control scheme for EV charger can therefore be effectively implemented.